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OOM #5 – Paper Rock, Scissors (2011)

Welcome to a strange day in October Overlook Madness. First of all, it was the first day of Valdivia, so sorry if you come to this post a bit late, but sometimes there’s no time to take a break and well, even if the movie of the day helps you in these ways, it’s still very hard to finally sit down and write your daily thing, specially when you have to write about the movies you saw at the same time. Today the Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness featured not only a movie that I’ve seen, but also one of the best horror movies ever made, ‘Suspiria’ (1977), and one of the 5 best that he has ever featured on his retrospectives so far, and while he clearly doesn’t think much of it (he clearly admires it more than loves it), it still is a compelling video which you can watch here. Since yesterday’s film was ‘Frozen’ (2010), and my personal list doesn’t have any films of 2010 or after that are in the Horror genre, and since I don’t like going backwards, I decided to jump ahead one year, 2011, and find the highest rated horror film that had an entry on the site Letterboxd. What I came up with was this strange horror comedy short film. If this continues and tomorrow we have another movie that I’ve seen coming from Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness, we will jump to 2012 and do the same thing. Let’s hope I don’t have to do that again.

Apparently Heather Wixson, the director of ‘Paper Rock, Scissors’ (2011) is a famous critic and collaborator for many horror webpages and this was her debut in the realms of actual filmmaking. According to IMDb she hasn’t done much in directing since then, and while I don’t think she is any good or great, I do think that she has the outlandish imagination that is necessary and also a breath of fresh air in the genre, as long as she stays away from a tongue-in-cheek tone that permeates this short. The film is the chronicle of a date, a guy comes to a girl’s apartment and they have dinner, but before food is served he finds a cardboard cutout of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, which seems to have a mind of its own, as it moves around and converses with the girl in complete silence. An obsession is discovered by the guy, and well, the title could tell you about how it all ends, and I guess that’s the main fault that this short film has: it’s eager to please in the most simple and dumb ways possible, through laughter and ridicule at what we see. I would’ve loved this if it was played straight, an actual cardboard cutout killing people is a scary concept as ridiculous as it sounds, it could work in the same vein as mannequins sometimes work in films, but here we are in a movie that wastes all potential in the silly jokes, starting with its title. A film with potential and a good calling card, but not worth watching again. You can find this on Vimeo if you google around.

Amicus Productions: Horror-Scifi

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965)
The Skull (1965)
Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965)
The Psychopath (1966)
Dalek's Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966)
The Terrornauts (1967)
The Deadly Bees (1967)
They Came from Beyond Space (1967)
Torture Garden (1967)
The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970)
The House That Dripped Blood (1971)
I, Monster (1971)
Tales from the Crypt (1972)
What Became of Jack and Jill? (1972)Asylum (1972)
The Vault of Horror (1973)-- And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)
From Beyond the Grave (1974)
Madhouse (1974)
The Beast Must Die (1974)
The Land That Time Forgot (1975)
At the Earth's Core (1976)
The People That Time Forgot (1977)
The Monster Club (1981)

Hammer Pictures: Horror-Fantasy-Sci Fi

The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1935)
Man in Black (1949)
Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949)
Dick Barton at Bay (1950)
Four Sided Triangle (1953)
Spaceways (1953)
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
X: The Unknown (1956)The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Quatermass 2 (1957)
The Abominable Snowman (1957)
Tales of Frankenstein (1958)Dracula (1958)The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)
The Mummy (1959)
The Stranglers of Bombay (1960)The Brides of Dracula (1960)
The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)
The Terror of the Tongs (1961)
Taste of Fear (1961)
The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
Shadow of the Cat (1961)
Captain Clegg (1962)
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Paranoiac (1963)
The Damned (1963)
Maniac (1963)
The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
The Old Dark House (1963)
Nightmare (1964)
The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
The Gorgon (1964)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)
Fanatic (1965)
She (1965)
The Nanny (1965)
The Plague of the Zombies (1966)Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
The Reptile (1966)
Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966)
The Witches (1966)
One Million Years B.C. (1966)
Slave Girls (1967)
The Mummy's Shroud (1967)
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Journey to Midnight (1968)
Journey into Darkness (1968)
The Vengeance of She (1968)
The Lost Continent (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
"Journey to the Unknown" (1968)Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969)
Moon Zero Two (1969)Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
Crescendo (1970)
The Vampire Lovers (1970)
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)Scars of Dracula (1970)
Lust for a Vampire (1971)
Countess Dracula (1971)
Creatures the World Forgot (1971)
Twins of Evil (1971)
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971)
Hands of the Ripper (1971)
Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971)
Vampire Circus (1972)Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)
Straight on Till Morning (1972)
Fear in the Night (1972)
Demons of the Mind (1972)The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974)
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
"Hammer House of Horror" (1980)
"Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense" (1984)
Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1984)
Beyond the Rave (2008)
Let Me In (2010)The Resident (2011)